Beethoven Piano Sonata in B Flat Major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier" - Part 2

In the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein famously helped to popularize the music of a then relatively obscure composer, Gustav Mahler. His work, as well as the work of other conductors, made Mahler into a clas...

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Nowadays it's hard to imagine Maurice Ravel as a "bad-boy" revolutionary, a member of a group whose name can be loosely translated as The Hooligans. To most listeners today, Ravel's music is the very ...

6 Nov 202557min

Longtime listeners of Sticky Notes know that Shostakovich's 10 symphony was the inaugural piece covered on the show. It's been 8 years(!) since that show, so I've totally re-written the episode and ha...

27 Okt 202559min

There are so many great apocryphal stories in the long history of classical music, from the reason Tchaikovsky wrote his Sixth Symphony to what famous composers supposedly said on their deathbeds, to ...

9 Okt 202547min

One of my favorite things about having Patreon sponsors is that they often suggest the most fascinating pieces and topics for shows. Adrian, who sponsored a show last year, gave me one of my favorite ...

25 Sep 202555min

The great Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski said this after the premature death of his contemporary Grazyna Bacewicz: "She was born with an incredible wealth of musical talent, which she succeeded to...

6 Sep 202557min

I had such a wonderful time joining the jazz podcast You'll Hear It! We talked about the meeting of jazz and classical music, a topic I've explored before, but never in this much depth and never with ...

22 Aug 20251h 10min

In the mid-1920s, Maurice Ravel wrote a letter to the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger's class was a mecca for composers, both young and old, and musicians from all over the wo...

7 Aug 202544min